


Trelkez Soup

by depressaria



Category: Farscape
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Community: hc_bingo, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-16 13:01:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12343203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depressaria/pseuds/depressaria
Summary: Chiana and Jool leave Moya during the events of I-Yensch, You-Yensch and encounter difficulties while trying to survive on their own on a commerce planet.





	Trelkez Soup

**Author's Note:**

> For the ‘comfort food or item / feeding someone’ square on my hc_bingo card.

They took a transport pod to a nearby commerce planet and tried to disappear. It wasn’t hard to glide under the radar. Uncommon as it may have been to see Nebari and Interion traveling together, no one seemed to care. Most likely, no one would have cared even if they were traveling with Naj Gil as well. The planet’s cities had a major overcrowding issue, and infrastructure like an insect hive. 

They holed up in an abandoned apartment and spent three solar days making the place livable. It gave them something to do to occupy themselves, to keep themselves from thinking about the fact that they just abandoned their friends to death or worse. They’d be on the command carrier by now, if Scorpius didn’t have everyone but Crichton killed on sight.

Chiana thought it’d be easier for Jool, since she wasn’t close to the others on Moya the way Chiana was, but for the first week she cried intermittently; her eyes were constantly red and puffy and the nails in the walls ended up all melted in on themselves, making it so they’d be impossible to pry out even if either of them wanted to.

“I’m sad for Pilot and Moya, mostly,” Jool said more times than Chiana could count. “The others will be fine, I’m sure, and if they’re not they knew what they were getting into. But Leviathans are peaceful creatures, and the idea of condemning one to death is abhorrent. But that’s what we just did, isn’t it? Maybe not directly, but we sort of implied we don’t care what happens to them, didn’t we? It seems to me that’s the statement we made.”

It was already getting annoying.

Every time Jool brought it up, Chiana told her that she was sure they were fine, and mostly managed to keep the irritable edge out of her voice. She was this close to telling Jool that Pilot could be pretty spiteful when he wanted to be, and that everyone else they’d ever met wanted to take advantage of Pilot and Moya anyways, so it was no good blaming their hardships on the crew. Anyone else would have enslaved Pilot or killed Moya for her modifications, so it was complete dren to sit there acting like it was their fault Moya was always in danger. Easy for Jool to judge when she wasn’t there to see what everyone was like at the beginning, when none of them trusted the others as far as Rygel could throw D’Argo but they slept with the doors of their cells open anyways because they just couldn’t stand seeing the bars shut for one moment longer. If she though they were all irredeemably violent criminals _now_ … 

She told herself she knew what she was getting into when she chose to travel with Jool. Even though it was too late to go back to Moya, she didn’t have to stick with her. She could sneak off at any time and lose her in the city. There was a reason why she didn’t. 

She wouldn’t be able to stand being alone again, but sometimes it just made her feel all the lonelier, not being alone. Jool was falling apart despite both their best efforts, and Chiana thought some days that it’d be easier to go it alone, to not come home very morning to Jool burning dinner or Jool nagging or Jool complaining or Jool crying.

There’d be nothing left of her if she kept having to hold it together for the both of them.

~*~*~*~

The first time she sent Jool to the market alone, Jool came back with dirty clothes, an empty purse, and a bloody nose that matched the eye-searing red of her hair. Chiana had come to hate that particular shade of red. Used to be it’d get that color when she was about to do something stupid and brave. Now it got that way when she was feeling whiny and petulant and overwhelmed. 

“I think they broke my frelling nose,” Jool said by way of greeting, and sat down heavily on their one good chair. 

“It’s not broken,” Chiana told her, snatching the purse from her and shaking it out to see if the thieves missed anything. “You should’ve broken theirs, Princess. I thought you’d been getting the hang of violence.”

“There were _four_ of them,” Jool said sulkily. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Not lose all our money, maybe? That sound like a good idea to you? And maybe you could not turn on the waterworks tonight? It makes it very hard to have a constructive conversation with you.” That last part was unfair. True, but unfair, at least for the moment. Jool’s eyes were over-bright, but she didn’t appear to be in any danger of actually crying.

"It's just that you told me to make what we had last, and there was only one of them at first and he said he'd cut me a deal on some food cubes because he--he found me attractive, and I thought you'd be pleased about me being diplomatic. So I went into his shop and they ambushed me. They were gone with the money before I could even think."

It was hard to hold onto the anger. Feeling angry was easier than feeling lost and helpless, but neither were productive.

Which was selfish, she knew. She told herself that Jool had never been on her own like this, without the safety net of her parents' wealth or her cousins' protection and companionship, that this was likely the first time she was really feeling the consequences of self-preservation. Told herself that it wasn’t Jool's fault that she wasn’t Nerri. But frell, every day she found herself wishing more that she was. Chiana’d had to pick up the slack for Nerri sometimes, but as much as they were siblings they were a team. Partners. At this point, Jool was dead weight, and getting deader. 

~*~*~*~

When the plague hit, she thought at first that it would be a good thing for them. Scared people were stupid people, and stupid people were easy marks. There’d been times when the only reason why her and Nerri survived was because she knew how best to take advantage of the chaos.

Of course, her luck seemed to have run out a long time ago. 

She ignored the symptoms as long as she could, but there’d be no hiding it from Jool, so she spent as little time as possible at home—or at least, what passed for a home these days. 

All that meant was that when she finally succumbed to the fatigue and headache that’d been building up for a week, it was in the most embarrassing way possible; she passed out while in the middle of pointedly avoiding Jool’s gaze and passive aggressively slamming a bag of food cubes onto the rickety table in their kitchen. 

~*~*~*~

Consciousness returned unwillingly when it came at all, and she was aware of little but Jool moving about their flat, and more activity outside than there’d been since they came here. But she was never awake long enough to ask what was going on. 

~*~*~*~

When she woke up for real, it was to see Jool crouched at her side, mixing something together in a small bowl. There was more noise outside the building than there had been since they’d arrived on the planet, and Jool's hair was violently red in the gloom, but whatever she was doing, she was doing with sure and steady hands, nothing at all like her usual hysterical efforts at problem-solving. 

After a moment she looked up, seeming to finally realize that Chiana was awake. "Go back to sleep," she said. "We have time before we have to go; it's all right." Her voice wasn’t half as steady as her hands were, but it was steady enough that the low-level anxiety building somewhere in the back of Chiana’s mind wasn’t able to cut through her exhaustion. 

“What’s going on?” Chiana asked, sitting up and trying to ignore the vehement protestations of her joints. 

“They’re evacuating the planet.”

“Why aren’t we already on a transport pod, then?” She tried to swing her legs out of bed, but Jool pushed her back into place with what appeared to be distressingly little effort. 

“You’re too sick. It’ll be okay.” 

It took her way too long to process the simple sentence. By the time she’d figured it out and started on formulating a response through the headache that was starting to burn through her residual grogginess, Jool had finished whatever she was doing with the bowl and was offering it to her. 

“I don’t want—“ she started to say, but was cut off by Jool implacably tipping it into her mouth. She’d been expecting a bitter, medicinal taste, but it was surprisingly inoffensive. She took the hint and the bowl. 

“My cousin used to make that for me,” Jool said. It wasn’t in her feel-bad-for-me-my-life-is-suffering voice, which is probably why it made Chiana feel so bad for her. “He gave me the recipe but I never bothered to try it out before.” She smiled ruefully and added, “Makes me sound a bit awful, doesn’t it?” 

Sometimes she forgot that Jool had lost family, too. 

“Makes you sound like you haven’t spent a lot of time around sick people,” she said. Then, “If you need to go, go. I don’t want you getting stuck here because of me.”

“It'll be all right," Jool said, smoothing Chiana's hair back from her face. “They’re just evacuating because of the plague. You’ve already got it and Interions are immune. We’ll figure it out when you’re better. We picked up and left before, and we can do it again. It's what we're good at, right?"

That was a punch to the frelling gut. But she wasn’t awake long enough to feel it. 

~*~*~*~

They ended up leaving before Chiana was fully recovered. For all her talk about how they’d figure it out, Jool had obviously not expected the planet to clear out so fast, and seemed to be getting increasingly anxious that they’d end up stranded.

So instead they ended up crammed onto a small transport pod with about a dozen other people, Chiana dutifully sipping more cousin-soup from a vacuum flask while Jool went from passenger to passenger, treating their bumps and scrapes as well as they could be treated while packed in like cattle. Chiana was past the point of being contagious, but it was still only because of Jool’s medical training that they were able to barter their way onto the ship. 

The transport took them to a larger medical ship, which was helping to transplant evacuees who either weren’t sick or who’d already recovered. 

Jool kept casting mildly concerned glances at her as they waited in line to find out where they’d be sent, so Chiana said, “Your soup’s gross when it gets cold.”

“Why do you have to be so horrible all the time?” Jool asked, scowling, but most of the tension left her shoulders. 

They rode the transport pod to a nearby commerce planet and tried to disappear.


End file.
